Unofficial news and tips about Google

August 21, 2009

Google Listen, a Podcast Manager for Android

As you probably noticed, Google releases many interesting services as Android applications and some of them are part of Google Labs: an application that records GPS tracks, a star map, a directory of points of interest. The latest release is an application titled Google Listen, a player for podcasts.

"Listen from Google Labs brings podcasts and web audio to your Android-powered device. It lets you search, subscribe, download and stream. By subscribing to programs and search terms it will create a personalized audio-magazine loaded with fresh shows and news stories whenever you listen."

The application lets you search thousands of podcasts, so it will be interesting to see if the podcast search engine will have a web interface. For now, Google Listen is an experiment and Google still has work to do to improve "networking, sdcard management, download storage, subscription updates, search quality, indexing more web audio, additional languages, and user experience".

And speaking of Google's Android apps, Anil Dash made an interesting point last month: "Google's recent development work on applications for mobile devices has often been delivered exclusively as applications for their own Android platform instead of as iPhone applications, despite the fact that iPhones are roughly forty times more popular in the marketplace."